Douglass E. Post - Creating and Using Virtual Prototyping Software: Principles and Practices

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The purpose of our book is to provide guidance for engineers and scientists who want to acquire or develop software to improve the competitiveness of their engineering and scientific research organizations with virtual prototypes. Virtual prototypes replace physical prototypes in the product development process. They are an extension of computer-aided design that allows product developers not just to visualize product designs, but to accurately predict their performance, using physics-based software tools, before anything is manufactured. When applied to natural systems such as the weather, they allow forecasts of behavior to a level of accuracy never before possible.

Engineering design and scientific research have always involved working with abstractions of new products or the objectives of research. For the development of complex products, the abstraction may start with a mental image of the new product that can be then translated into a drawing or physical model. For scientific research, the abstraction may be an expectation of the result of an experiment or an observation of natural phenomena. As science and technology have progressed from ancient times to the present, the usefulness of these abstractions has grown immensely.

This progress has accelerated dramatically during the last 50 years or so. Computing power has grown explosively from 1 floating point operation per second (FLOP) at the end of World War II to 1017 FLOPS today. The consequences of this are almost as dramatic as the stunning increase in computing power. It is now possible to use computers to design and accurately predict the behavior of complex products such as supersonic jet aircraft and to accurately forecast the behavior of complex natural phenomena such as the weather.